A book, as it were, closes the book.
ALAN BENNETTCulminating with a man in a white coat saying to one kindly, “And now can you tell me the name of the Prime Minister?”
More Alan Bennett Quotes
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f they’d been working with Alec Guinness, for instance, they wouldn’t have known they were born if they’d not towed the line!
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The masters had no idea what was expected of you in the scholarship exam, so you just had to busk it really.
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I wish they were like the White Rhinosix of them left in the Serengeti National Park, and all males.
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You always know when you’re going to arrive. If you go by car, you don’t. Apart from anything else, I prefer cycling. It puts you in a good mood, I find.
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Books did not care who was reading them or whether one read them or not. All readers were equal, herself included. Literature, she thought, is a commonwealth; letters a republic.
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Why do we not care to acknowledge them? The cattle, the body count.
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If you think squash is a competitive activity, try flower arranging.
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If I am doing nothing, I like to be doing nothing to some purpose. That is what leisure means.
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If you find yourself born in Barnsley and then set your sights on being Virginia Woolf it is not going to be roses all the way.
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But then, when I did go, the contrast between Leeds, which was very black and sooty in those days, and Cambridge, which seemed like something out of a fairystory, in the grip of a hard frost, was just wonderful.
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History is a commentary on the various and continuing incapabilities of men. What is history? History is women following behind with the bucket.
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I suppose I’m the only person who remembers one of the most exciting of his ballets-it’s the fruit of an unlikely collaboration between Nijinsky on the one hand and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle on the other.
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We were put to Dickens as children but it never quite took. That unremitting humanity soon had me cheesed off.
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The Breed never dies. Sapper, Buchan, Dornford Yates, practitioners in that school of Snobbery withViolence that runs like a thread of good-class tweed through twentieth-century literature.
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Books are not about passing time. They’re about other lives. Other worlds.
ALAN BENNETT